Mangifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango

Sopan Joshi is an independent journalist and author based in Delhi. He entered journalism in 1996 after acquiring an MA in English literature. He has written and edited for a variety of publications. Joshi has reported on land and agriculture, water and forestry, public health and science, indigenous peoples and the environment. His writing interests include travel and adventure sports and motoring, religion and politics. He has five non-fiction titles to his name, written mostly in Hindi and some of these are for children. These are: Ek Tha Mohan : Mahatma Gandhi Ka Jeevan Parichay ( Rajkamal Prakashan, 2020), Bapu Ki Paati : Mahatma Gandhi Ke Jeevan Prasang (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2020), Shivputra Katha - Kumar Gandharva Ki Jeevani/ Kumar Gandharva - An Improbable Life (Hindi & English, Ektara Trust, 2023), and Jal Thal Mal (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2018).

Mangifera Indica is his first nonfiction book in English. It is an absolutely fascinating account of the king of fruits intertwined with a bit of a memoir. This particular chapter from which these extracts are taken is an incredible account of the significance of the fruit in India’s statecraft, over the centuries. There are references to the fourteenth century Mauryan emperor Ashoka’s edict, erected at Topra, near Ambala, but brought to Delhi now, mentioning the mango groves planted along the highways. In the sixteenth century, Sher Shah Suri had mango trees planted along the Grand Trunk Road. According to historians, in Mughal times, ‘anyone who converted his cultivated land into an orchard was entitled to get all his revenue remitted.’ In Bihar’s Mithila region, mango orchards were not even taxed in the twentieth century. During the Peshwa period, when financial difficulty became acute and the revenue rate was increased, then cultivation of cash crops such as mangoes were encouraged. British land surveyors noted the fruit’s economic worth.

Sopan Joshi then goes on to elaborate upon how despite recognising the fruit’s worth, the British did very little to promote its cultivation. In fact, with the Permanent Settlement formalized in 1793, the new zamindari system meant the appropriation of lands and a propensity to cutting down mango topes. Even with the rapid expansion of the railroads, there was no effort to plant mango along the tracks, instead the opposite act of ecological deforestation was actively pursued. The author shares many anecdotes regarding the fruit including Alexander’s soldiers being prevented in 326 BC on eating this sweet fruit as it would result in dysentery. Ibn Battuta mentions a story he heard in the Malabar region in the fourteenth century. The First Battle of Panipat was fought near a mango orchard in 1526, The Battle of Plassey (23 June 1757) was fought in a mango orchard. Babur when seeking a sign from God regarding his ambition for conquering Hindustan, he wanted the sign to be presented in the form of “betel-leaves and mangoes”. Modern day historians have remarked upon the political significance of the fruit. Foreigners were astonished to discover the proportion of their income that the Mughal noblemen and administrators spent on the fruit. Thomas Roe, English ambassador who visited Jahangir’s court, failed to recognize the compliment he was paid when Prime Minister Asaf Khan sent him a basked of twenty musk melons. He is quoted as saying, “all I have ever received was eatable and drinkable’, and that the Indians must ‘suppose our felicity lies in the palate’. Roe did not realize that he had been sent the highest gift of the Mughals. The mango continued to be a significant fruit in Indian politics and horticulture. Even the second nawab of Bengal, Shuja-ud-Daula (r.1727-1739), invited gardeners and skilled horticulturists for refining mango cultivation. Courtly patronage of horticulture in several parts of India were known for their fine mangoes: Lucknow, Hyderabad, and Junagadh. Among the wealthy merchant families and princely states, the mango manager became a common position.

The author recounts a wonderful anecdote describing the influence of the Central Asian fruit culture. Arun Kumar, a journalist and socio-political activist, opened my eyes to it. He was born in 1941 to a prosperous family in Kandla, a town in western Uttar Pradesh, in the heart of rich orchard territory. He once told me about his uncle Gyan Prakash, a firebrand local leader of Hindu nationalist outfits. ‘When it comes to selling the crop of his mango orchard, however, he refused to give it to the Hindu gardeners,’ said Kumar, recalling an incident in 1948. ‘He didn’t say no to the man, just something innocuous. After he left, he said Pathan gardeners of Afghan extraction had raised the orchards with love and care, so he was only going to sell the crop to them.’ It went further. Arun Kumar recollected, with great excitement, this one time when a cow had given birth to a calf; his uncle refused to give it to Hindus who came asking because they needed a bullock. ‘I’ll give it to my Pathans. They look after animals very well,’ he remembered his uncle saying.

In contemporary India, it is estimated that Muslims constitute 70-80 per cent of the fruit wholesalers as compared to 90 per cent in the 1980s. Also, the importance of using the fruit in negotiations cannot be undermined as is evident in the story about the prosperous mango orchard owner who wanted to purchase a car, but its waiting list was long. Once he had sent across two baskets of the fruit to the manager of the local car dealership, his car was delivered the very next day!

Reading Mangifera Indica has been an incredibly delicious experience. Read it.

—Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

Extract:

History: The Great Leveller

‘On account of the hardy nature of the tree, low cost of maintenance, and profuse yield, it has come to be known as the poor man’s fruit, and thus possesses mass appeal.’

—56 behari singh

In 1949, socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia was arrested for violating curfew. He was leading a protest against the ruling dynasty of Nepal in front of the Nepalese embassy in New Delhi. He spent a month and a half in prison; along with him was a young activist named Rajinder Sachar. While in prison, Lohia received a basket of mangoes, Sachar was to later write: ‘It was a gift of goodwill from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.’1

Vallabhbhai Patel, the deputy prime minister, was upset about the message this sent. Nehru replied that Lohia was not a criminal but a political activist and that personal and political relations should not be mixed, noted Sachar, who many years later went on to serve as the chief justice of the Delhi High Court. Nehru had always looked upon Lohia with soft eyes; after all, Nehru was one of the earliest promoters of the young firebrand in the 1930s, when, along with some others he had formed the Congress Socialist Party. As the years rolled by, Lohia turned into Nehru’s staunch critic. In sending the mangoes to Lohia, Nehru was remembering the old warmth, not the new hostility.

History

The mango is a gesture of detente in statecraft. For example, whenever India and Pakistan resume dialogue after a period of hostility, mangoes are summoned. A basket of mangoes is a tried and tested way to disarm an antagonist and appear in a benevolent light, and it has been so for centuries. Gifts of mangoes have influenced geopolitics, history, and the maps of empires. Some of the biggest wars in India’s history were fought in mango groves; the results of wars have been attributed to mangoes.

‘History, as we know it, is a record of the wars of the world, and so there is a proverb among Englishmen that a nation which has no history, that is, no wars, is a happy nation,’ wrote M. K. Gandhi in his 1909 manifesto Hind Swaraj. ‘How kings played, how they became enemies of one another, and how they murdered one another is found accurately recorded in history, and, if this were all that had happened in the world, it would have been ended long ago.’ The mango fruit fuelled Gandhi during his campaigns for non-violent mobilization. ‘At one time in Bengal when I was working very hard I lived entirely on mangoes,’ he told Louis Fischer, an American journalist who went on to write Gandhi’s biography.2

Fischer first met him in 1942 when he spent a week with Gandhi at the Sevagram Ashram in Wardha. He described seeing Gandhi at the crack of dawn each day, eating mango pulp. ‘I again found him scooping mango sauce out of a deep glass,’ he wrote on 7 June 1942. Two mornings later, he found ‘Gandhi was having his mango meal’. In his 1891 speech to the London Vegetarian Society, Gandhi had called it ‘the most delicious fruit I have yet tasted’. Gandhi’s fondness for mangoes was such that the fruit escaped his notoriously quirky experiments with diet.

The complicated relationship comes out in ‘Mangoes and Mahatma’, the concluding chapter of American historian Nico Slate’s 2019 book on his diet. ‘Mango is a cursed fruit. It attracts attention as no other fruit does. We must get used to not treating it with so much affection,’ Gandhi wrote in a 1941 letter. Beginning in 1906 in South Africa, he had set about turning his life into that of an ascetic. He wrote about his human struggles to master his senses, at least by the superhuman standards he had set for himself.

‘The ambivalence in Gandhi’s relationship to mangoes reveals a larger tension at the centre of his diet, a tension between seeing food as an instrument of service and celebrating food for its own sake,’ wrote Slate. Gandhi’s mango travails reveal his struggles. ‘At stake was his ability to live a life that was passionate but not selfish, joyful but not lustful. The difficulty of discerning healthy desire from unhealthy lust is revealed by the most important detail in Gandhi’s encounter with the mangoes he yearned to share: their intended recipient.’3 It was Sarladevi Chowdhrani, a forty-seven-year-old activist he had met in 1919 in Lahore, when he was fifty; they kept their intense affection platonic. In a 1920 letter to her, he wrote: ‘Revashankerbhai came in this morning. He brought some luscious mangoes. I fretted to find that you were not here to share them.’

His ambiguities and uncertainties, wrote Slate, turned his diet experiments into a source of connection: ‘That is the lesson of the luscious mangoes. Our struggles with food are never ours alone.’4 Growing mangoes is its own way of establishing human connections. In 1932, during one of his nineteen imprisonments, Gandhi planted the seed of a mango he had eaten in Pune’s Yerwada prison. Upon getting released, he took the sapling with him in a pot; he was practically homeless now, having vowed not to return to Ahmedabad’s Sabarmati Ashram till the country was freed; he never did go back. The sapling is now a tree in Hyderabad in what was once the house of Congress leader Sarojini Naidu.

India remembers its historical figures by their association with the mango. Yet that’s no easy task; leaders do not document their lives as rigorously and honestly as Gandhi did. Historian Damodar D. Kosambi complained in 1956 about the lack of material despite India’s great literary heritage: ‘Many Indian kings of the Middle Ages (e.g. Harsa circa 600–640) were incomparably superior in their education and literary ability to contemporary rulers in Europe; they had personally led great armies to victory in heavy warfare. Nevertheless, not one seems ever to have thought of composing a narrative like Caesar’s Commentaries.’5

Many historians have worked to fill the gaps apparent in the 1950s. Their research shows how many of India’s historical events and figures were linked to the mango. The fruit becomes a means to tease out the political attitudes and economic policies of rulers. How administrators approach the mango reflects their views on public welfare or natural resource management or their cultural connections with the people they govern. This can throw up one or two surprises.

********The spread of mango husbandry is a metaphor for a sort of cultural joining, like grafting together two varieties. It shows how communities brought together by awkward historical events learn to tolerate each other, finding some use in each other. This does not happen through cliched mystical-religious experiences but by sharing mutually admired objects like the mango. Consider the current customs of celebration. It is now common across northern India to gift boxes of dried fruits on Diwali. This is a Punjabi custom owing to the region’s proximity to Afghanistan.

Little facts remind us of such links. Actor Dilip Kumar was the son of a fruit merchant from Peshawar. Music industry mogul Gulshan Kumar Dua assisted his father in running the family fruit juice shop in Delhi’s Daryaganj, before hitting paydirt in the devotional music wave of the 1980s. The fruit juice corner became a feature of Indian cities only after the Partition in 1947, with the coming of refugees. I’ve noticed the name Chaman on some such shops. In Farsi, it means a garden. Traditional horticulturists use it often. ‘They used to say bagh chaman ho gaya (the garden is thriving),’ Arun Kumar had said. It was a common name among Hindu and Jain business communities of northwestern India.

Chaman is also the name of a town along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; it is known for fruit trade. But Afghanistan’s horticulture is in shambles now. ‘In 1972, horticultural commodities supplied 40-60 per cent of all export earnings. Dried fruits from Afghanistan once accounted for 60 per cent of the world’s market,’ said a 2016 research paper.29 ‘Horticultural production is now estimated at less than 30 per cent of 1978 levels. Many fields are abandoned, many orchards destroyed; tree nurseries, seed sources, water, input, and knowledge are limited or non-functional.’

The Afghan Civil War damaged the Gardens of Babur in Kabul. Since 2008, it has been restored with the help of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). A few years ago, I met the director of its Delhi office, conservation architect Ratish Nanda, a former associate of architect and scholar Shaheer. The trust has worked to restore the Humayun’s Tomb complex in Delhi. Completed in the 1570s, the tomb is the prototype of what went on to be called Mughal architecture; its most famous example is the Taj Mahal. Nanda said Mughal architecture was not based on Iranian influence, as is commonly believed. He had travelled through Iran and parts of Central Asia, looking to trace its roots. He found some influence, but also found signs of Mughal influence on Iran. He explained how the tomb’s grand scale, the site plan, the material used, the four-dome layout of the edifice...it was all unprecedented.

As we walked about the tomb, flocks of rosy starlings appeared like dark clouds in the sky, conducting their aerial dance that ornithologists call murmuration. It was March; the colours of spring were taking over. The rosy starlings, long-distance travellers, were headed to their summer refuges in the Himalayas and Central Asia. It occurred to me that they might stop by the Gardens of Babur in Kabul. Newspaper features say the greenery of the gardens is a great respite for residents of the city ravaged by decades of war and violence.

The mango’s political utility is old but not outdated. Each prime minister of India must have his or her mango anecdotes. Ajit Prasad Jain, India’s agriculture minister in 1957, wrote: ‘They sometimes called mango the bathroom fruit, but one has to see Jawaharlal Nehru deftly slicing the mango on the banquet table—two pieces apart with stone removed. Ladies with delicate fingers are often seen envying him.’30 108 109 Hi s tory

On foreign travels, Nehru took cases of mangoes along with him. He gifted such cases to writer George Bernard Shaw and to the US President John F. Kennedy in 1961. He handed out lessons on eating the mango to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who ‘enthusiastically adopted the squeezing and sucking style of eating mangoes’, wrote Vikram Doctor.31 ‘...but Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was shown the more formal slicing and spooning method. A correspondent of The Times of India reported in 1955 that as Zhou ate his mango ‘his beetling brow relaxed, his lips rippled into a smile.... He had entered a new world of sweetness and goodwill. Thereafter, he ate out of Mr. Nehru’s hand and signed the famous joint declaration.’ Seven years later, China was to invade India and start a war, becoming a strategic ally of Pakistan’s.

Pakistan was not to be left behind. In 1968, its foreign minister gifted a crate of mangoes to Zhou Enlai’s boss, Mao Zedong. Chairman Mao was not interested, so he passed it on to a propaganda team. The fruits became Mao’s avatars, symbols of the Great Leader in a communist version of idol worship. When they began to decay, the mangoes were boiled in water and all the workers of certain factories had one teaspoon of the divine elixir. The mango was part of the political spectacle in China’s National Day Parade of 1968. Wax copies of the mango began to sell; the fruit featured in the propaganda posters of the Cultural Revolution. Alfreda Murck, a historian of Chinese art at the Columbia University in New York, wrote a book about this weird cult of the Mao-mango in 2013, titled Mao’s Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution.

Really, name a prime minister! Lal Bahadur Shastri gifted mango baskets to the Soviet premier. P. V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee continued to use the mango in foreign relations. In 2006–07, when Manmohan Singh was prime minister, the mango played a dramatic hand in diplomacy. Indo-US relations were thawing after a period of awkwardness and trade sanctions following India’s 1998 nuclear tests. A civilian nuclear deal was under negotiation, among other matters. The US was looking for a way to get India to allow the import of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which did not meet India’s vehicular emissions norms. Some Indian-origin entrepreneurs in the US found out; they were desperate for Indian mangoes, which were banned from import into the US to keep out insect pests. Their lobbying led to a trade deal under which India lowered its emission standards for the motorcycles and the US lowered its phytosanitary regulations to allow the import of Indian mangoes.

Mango diplomacy with the US and Soviets/Russia is nothing compared to the fruit’s role in Indo-Pak relations. Each time a side makes an effort to resume dialogue, baskets of mangoes cross the international border. In 1981, Pakistani President General Zia-ul-Haq sent mango baskets to his Indian counterpart Neelam Sanjiva Reddy and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. A newspaper cartoon dated 14 July 1981 has a mango crate being loaded into an F-16 fighter craft; in the foreground, Zia stands next to a bomb, instructing the pilot: ‘Deliver the mangoes first—and the bomb later!’32 The mangoes were of an exquisite Pakistani variety called Anwar Rataul. It did not take long for some mango growers from the village of Rataul to land up at the prime minister’s residence bringing with them the variety named after their village; some relatives had taken it with them to Pakistan at the time of the partition and renamed it Anwar Rataul.

When Narendra Modi became the prime minister in 2014, he invited his Pakistani counterpart Nawaz Sharif to attend the ceremony of oath-taking. One year later, in July 2015, Sharif sent Modi a box of mangoes as an Eid gift. Five months later, Modi paid Sharif a surprise visit on Christmas Day for his granddaughter’s wedding. Before the 2019 general elections in India, Bollywood actor Akshay Kumar met Modi for a ‘non-political interview’. The high point of that interaction was when he asked the prime minister how he likes to have his mangoes.

The mango has to carry burdens, political and non-political. It is both our great distraction and a reliable means of conversation. It is to Indians what the weather is to the English. The more we talk about it, the more it becomes our mirror. When people talk about the mango, they end up revealing something about themselves. Our mangoes define us.

Sopan Joshi, Mangifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango, Aleph Book Company, Hb. Pp. 432 pages. Rs.  799